darkchemistryfanboy

[darkchemistryfanboy]

Jason literally manages to shoot both Dick and Damian less than two pages after he’s introduced to them in as the fake Batman. Bro really said it’s on sight.

[darkchemistryfanboy]

Okay actually you know what I'm gonna make my own post about this.

Jason's primary goal in UTRH was not for Bruce to kill the Joker, it was about Bruce choosing Jason's wellbeing over the Joker. I don't think Jason ever expected Bruce to actually headshot the Joker. He's not stupid - he knows Bruce doesn't like guns, and he knows Bruce doesn't kill.* But Jason needed to get closure of some kind, and he wanted his dad to prove that Jason still had some kind of meaning to him, hence why the other option was for Bruce to kill him. If he wasn't going to choose Jason, if Jason was no longer his son, Jason would rather die than live with that choice.

Is it selfish to ask his dad to kill him if he doesn't want the Joker dead? Sure. I guess. It is more of a direct ask for Bruce to kill someone so like. Make of that what you will. But is it selfish to ask Bruce to stand aside and literally do nothing while Jason deals with it? I don't think so, and I don't think it was an unprecedented ask!

*Because Bruce has attempted to kill before, including in Jason's presence, and allowed others to kill with his blessing

Detective Comics #570: The Joker brainwashes Selina to be evil again. Jason stops Bruce from killing him, and Bruce notably says "he took her from me" (aka something Jason famously says in UTRH)

Batman #425: José Garzonas sets a trap for Batman and Robin due to Jason's (intentional or unintentional) involvement in the death of his son, Felipe. Bruce indirectly but intentionally kills three people in this issue, and he tells Jason outright that fathers avenge their sons.

Batman #429: Bruce intentionally goes after the Joker with the intent to kill him, and only delays that until Joker loses his diplomatic immunity. He does not attempt to save him, only asks Clark to find the body.

Detective Comics #741: After the Joker kills Sarah Essen, Bruce tells Jim Gordon to take the shot and he won't stop him.

(These are just what I remember off the top of my head; I know there are more, I just don't remember issue numbers rn)

"Joker's Last Laugh #6," the people cry, "what about Joker's Last Laugh #6?"

In Joker's Last Laugh #6, Dick beats the Joker to death and Bruce resuscitates him. But that was not about Bruce's refusal to kill or let his allies kill - it was about protecting Dick. Dick, who rather famously does not handle having blood on his hands very well even when it's not actually his fault (see Nightwing #93 and the fallout from that for proof of how poorly Dick copes with his perceived guilt).

If it were anyone but Dick, I genuinely believe that Bruce would have left it. Helena was there. Dinah was around. If one of them had taken out the Joker, I think Bruce would have let it lie. Helena and Dinah are not Bruce's kids, and they both have killed before. It's not their first choice, but they have in fact killed and are willing to do so again. Bruce bringing back the Joker wasn't about keeping him alive, it was about protecting Dick's mental health (and he uh. kinda failed at that anyway. Good try though 👍)

So how on earth is UTRH an unreasonable ask? Jason says "let me kill him, or do it yourself, or kill me," and really, there's no reason Bruce should have stopped him. This is more direct and personal than either Bruce's attempt in 'tec #570 or the opening he gives Gordon in 'tec #741. This is Jason asking for Bruce to live up to the standard Bruce himself set in Batman #425. Jason doesn’t have Dick's problem with killing, he's killed several times and he's more than willing to do this. His first option, Jason killing the Joker, asks nothing of Bruce. Bruce literally had to do nothing in UTRH, and Jason would have counted that as a win. Probably. We'll never know for sure, because for whatever reason, Judd Winick decided that in this scenario, Bruce's best move was to throw a batarang through Jason's neck.

So no, UTRH is not Jason being a hypocrite who claims to want to protect people from the Joker but really just wants validation (I mean, he does want validation, and he does want the Joker dead to protect people, but that's not the point). UTRH is Jason asking Bruce for less than the bare minimum that Bruce established when Jason was Robin, and Bruce failing to allow even that. UTRH is Jason desperately screaming for Bruce to prove that he cares even a little bit about him, and Bruce trying to duck out at every opportunity. UTRH is about a kid, 17 or 18, maybe 19 at best, asking his dad to love him and getting a knife to the neck for his trouble.

No wonder Jason goes on a full villain arc after this - I would too.

[darkchemistryfanboy]

Can't believe you're arachnophobic :(

I need to make it extremely clear to everybody here that I do not want to fuck a giant spider

[darkchemistryfanboy]

It's like.

If you are raised in a culture, with a lot of people around you from the same culture, chances are the things all of you consider sacred and the things all of you consider disgusting are pretty similar. And it's pretty easy to consider that things that are different from your norm are disturbing, things that don't fit into what you consider sacred are disgusting. And if you are taught that morals are absolute and that things are inherently good or evil and that everyone knows within their heart if something is good or evil, then it's easy to infer that the things you find disturbing or disgusting are inherently evil. And because you are surrounded by people from the same culture, who were taught to find the same things sacred and disturbing and disgusting, it is very probable that the people around you will agree with you on those things, creating a positive feedback loop and giving you the illusion that your beliefs about morality are shared by everyone: "of course X is inherently evil! Everyone knows that!! Everyone believes so!"

But eventually, for whatever reason, you and your group of like-minded buddies end up stumbling upon someone from a different culture -sometimes even whole people, who have grown to consider different things as sacred and different things as disgusting. And because of that, it is highly probable that these people might break one of the moral rules which your group holds as absolute. And stemming from that, it is incredibly easy to understand how one could think "look at these people! They are violating X sacred rule that me and my buddies hold as absolute and self-evident! This behaviour which we hold as inherently unethical is accepted in their culture! Look at how morally inferior to us they are! Our culture is so much better... It is our burden to right this slight against morals and everything sacred. It is our duty to teach them better. We must help them become more civilised." And that's how deontology implicitly supports and sustains imperialism and racism.

But we have been granted the incredible ability to take a step back and reflect upon our own thoughts and, that, no matter what we have been taught in the past, is the tool to self-reflect and avoid enforcing your cultural standard under the guise of universal ethics. And it's not all just utilitarianism, there are a lot of different ways to enact this self-reflection upon the judgements we pass. Utilitarianism isn't even the only consequentialist approach there is. Who does this behaviour harm? What is the goal intended behind this behaviour? Can this action be understood as an act of love, of fostering community amongst people? Is this action undertaken with the intent to help, to create something good? Is this strict rule I believe in applicable in reality, does it serve anything to try and enforce that belief, what is the practicality of it? Am I reaching out towards people by projecting and imposing my sense of self upon them, or am I connecting from a place of openness, ready to withhold my judgement and learn from what is different? What is the nature of the connections I wish to develop with people?

Thinking about it like that, the idea that things are inherently evil, in and of themselves, does appear to me as really shallow. "Why is X bad? Because it simply is. Why would you question it? Everyone knows this is bad. Honestly, even questioning it suggests to me that you have not internalised the golden rules fully within you, and this makes you incredibly suspect as it means you doubt which increases your probability of sinning doing something evidently evil." I don't know, I don't want my ethics to be based on whatever conceptions of what is disgusting or sacred are trending in my cultural in-group at this moment in human history. I don't want to hurt people just because it's culturally acceptable and I don't want to judge people who aren't hurting anyone just because I feel an automatic response of disgust when confronted with a cultural practice and I don't think making certain specific acts taboo is a useful way to help anybody and I don't believe critical thinking is a sin.

There are a lot of answers to the question "why would killing my grandma be unethical?" that don't conclude in favour of me killing my grandma. Because it would cause harm. Because it would make me, myself, miserable. Because killing her would be antithetical to connecting with her on the basis of what we have in common fundamentally as human beings, to goals of spreading love and fostering community. Because it would reduce general happiness. Because it is useful for human societies to condemn gratuitous murder. Because it is antithetical to my goal of interacting with the world from a place of openness and acceptance, learning instead of inflicting.

Rejecting deontology and acknowledging its ties to imperialism and bigotry and oppression, doesn't mean into some sort of nihilist relativism where absolutely everything is acceptable always. There are plenty of ways to look at ethical questions from a different standpoint. A lot of them feel limited, or contradictory, or like it's messy and complicated and I'm still not sure which one I like best, and I believe emotion does and should play a role in ethical situations, and I believe that emotion must be self-reflected upon and analyzed as the information that it is, and I do not know yet all that this introspection entails and I do not know yet how to reconcile my desire to build community through love of mankind and everything that unites us and my desire to withhold projecting my sense of self upon others to hold a space open for people to happen to me instead in acceptance of all that they differ from me. It's all super complicated and messy and far less clear-cut than a simple list of rules I should like to follow. I am still, after all, really young for a human being, and this is a question a lot of people have died without finding satisfying answer to, and it is a deeply intimate process that one must undertake for themselves to grow as a person.

But I do know that I refuse to content myself with the idea that my gut feeling is magic, that things are black and white because they must be so, that things are good and bad just because I said so.

[darkchemistryfanboy]

your superhero/villain mantle is now your tumblr username. all of it. what is your story + powers/abilities and what comic would you be in, reblog with your answers in the tag

[darkchemistryfanboy]

[darkchemistryfanboy]

still thinking about (always fucking thinking about) what i posted here, on mia's explicit on-page murder vs. jason and felipe and how it's treated both by ollie and bruce respectively, and also by their respective *narratives*.

one of the things i loved about winicks ga/ga&bc run in general was like. it was so uninterested in punishment. when someone did something harmful the emphasis was on the consequences--material and emotional--rather than issues of Right vs Wrong. it focused on who was hurt, where to go from there, how to fix it, and i found that especially 🥺 when it came to mia killing.

because the reaction is so compassionate to her. like, no one is like shaking their finger at mia like You Did A Bad Thing, it's like ollie and dinah *both* immediately are horrified by the fact that she's going to have to live with this for the rest of her life and moreover that ollie put her in that position in the first place.

i already posted these panels but. look again.

and mia and jason as characters were in conversation with each other from the instant mia started being built up to be the 2nd speedy--the same way roy and dick were always in conversation with each other (because everyone knows the REAL second robin was the first speedy). and doubly so when winick took over and tweaked her backstory so she was also homeless. (gonna make a post on the HIV development at some point and how starlin openly talked about wanting to give robin AIDS...)

but like. look

vs

*Jason* couldn't handle it so now *i* can't keep him as my partner compared to. the blame falling directly, and rightly, on ollie for putting mia in that position in the first place... *and* this is the arc preceding the one where mia actually takes the speedy mantle! she wasn't speedy yet! she killed someone on her test run! and she still becomes speedy! and she does a fucking phenomenal job as speedy! tied for first fucking place if you ask me and roys my most favoritest and specialest guy!

and like. god. they don't linger on whether or not mia was wrong to kill that man. ollie clearly thinks there was another way, but he's not going to drill that into mias head, unlike someone else we could name, *bruce.*

"consequences, robin, such as me accidentally crushing a man to death by climbing a teetering stack of cars like a moron. for some reason i am heavily implying that this is your fault."

like ... come *on.*

and yknow. a lot of this is just that starlin was a fucking hack. but what we have here is still that bruce would rather bash jason over the head with moral lessons than ever give more than a cursory consideration to how hes fucking feeling.

(which is also, btw, such a stark change from how bruce still was in the contemporaneous tec run or even the batman run directly preceding it where when bruce screws up by not telling jason willis was (probably) dead, he admits he screwed up and apologizes. like, its such a tangible, jarring shift from bruce being a flawed but loving dad into whatever the hell this is. --lets not start on wolfman here because he did a better job than starlin, not that thats a high bar. im not opposed to the bad mentor/dad bruce character development *in principle*, its about the execution.)

but yeah, like, just the way like... its about who put mia in that situation. its about how jason just wasn't good enough. its about how mia gets to keep trying to be a hero. its about how jason is benched (<- he was supposed to stay home in 425; officially benched in 426). its about how it didn't matter whether or not jason killed felipe, because jason "couldn't handle it." its about how it mattered that mia killed someone, because she shouldn't have ever been put in a situation where she felt like she had to.

the discourse about ga 69-72 is always so tedious and always so thoroughly misses the damb point. but putting aside the whole like yes yes naughty jason he shouldn't have done it or at least shouldn't have done it like he did it--namely scaring the ever-loving crap out of her--what happened was jason came to her while she was in uniform (<- NOT EVEN KNOWING ABOUT THE MURDER!! HE DIDNT EVEN KNOW!!!) and among other things that was him going, i'm like you, what happened to me could happen to you, and she said i'm nothing like you and it won't, and he said, are you sure.

but when it comes down to it if mia died and came back and set up an elaborate murderous rube goldberg machine scheme to get to ollie it wouldn't work because the first damn thing ollie would do when he saw her would be to give her a famous arrowfam hug and blubber all over her. and. i mean. come on, the jokers ass would be grass, you know it i know it, ollie would have rather caused a diplomatic incident or whatever the fuck than let the man who killed his kid live. (<- i say kid over daughter deliberately btw. genuinely don't think mia was in the market for another dad after the first one. ollies still her family, shes still his kid, thats how it is. i probably wouldn't be so inflexible about this if fandom wasnt fucking obnoxious about insisting that she *is* and *must be* his daughter, but they are so i am.)

anywayyyyyyyy speedy sweep! wahoo

[darkchemistryfanboy]

The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.

[darkchemistryfanboy]

How is bnha anime of the decade...... they aren’t even anime of the hour of the minute of the second

[darkchemistryfanboy]

its really wild the way the arrowfam attracts such militantly prudey fans on here LMAO like ... "oh i love mia i just ignore mias crushes on ollie, connor, and dodger because theyre incest and/or problematic" i dont think you actually love her bro. i think you made up a Good Victim in your head and are policing others for not conforming to the fashy ~sexually pure~ version that lives in your imagination and not the actual comic because her taste in men is actually a throughline of her characterization from beginning to end. also words mean things and its not incest you just have nuclear family brainrot

[darkchemistryfanboy]

Short compilation of Bruce "letting Jason get away with things" panels

[darkchemistryfanboy]

[darkchemistryfanboy]

every so often I check into the current d20 discourse of the week and laugh my ass off because it is literally just 'I fucking HATE nuance and people who give teenage girls nuance'

[darkchemistryfanboy]

Reblog if it’s ok for your mutuals to tag you in posts they think you’ll like even if you don’t talk often.

[darkchemistryfanboy]

157

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[darkchemistryfanboy]

Nah cause I fully believe people are allowed to have different opinions and evaluations of the UTH confrontation, like that's why it's a trolley problem, it's supposed to be a dilemma, I can totally understand people disagreeing with me about what would be the correct decision- what I find annoying is that take I keep seeing that Jason fans are "falling for their empathy bias" and letting it distract them from the fact that killing is wrong. Talk about patronising - the idea that the only reason someone could disagree with you is because they're letting their emotions overwhelm their judgement... Like I can respect that you hold philosophical beliefs and a reasoning I don't have access to that make you hold this position, please don't disrespect me by assuming you understand my reasoning and the reasoning of the people who agree with me. I don't even pretend to assume the people who agree with me share my reasoning as to why they agree. Do not assume that i am not falling for my empathy bias I am jumping into it. Like, that's the point. Empathy bias my beloved I will defend your ethical validity I'm sorry popular culture has made you into a villain. Maybe I should feel more annoyed at the lack of perspective taking and respect for my intelligence as a whole, but mostly it's the presumption that I'm leaning into my empathy accidentally rather than voluntarily.

Genuinely though, joke aside: I know you may have a clear, clean-cut stance on the topic, but the question of the ethicality of murder in trolley problems has been going on for centuries. Claiming that it's a simple question and that anyone who disagrees is simply "too emotional" is not only wrong, it's either arrogant, ignorant, or both.

[darkchemistryfanboy]

So, lost in the sauce as I am for Jason's short-lived non-canon mom and that family drama - had a thought, a non-original what if au with Jason being found and adopted by Natalia (and in extension, her adoptive brother Anton*), and becomes a gentleman thief, rather than Robin.

This what if is what it says on the tin, but I also wanted to lean in on a "phantom thief" idea - because I'm a glutton for angst, Jason does die, but is resurrected through another means that's more occult related (vampiric in nature) instead.

So, instead of Batman training, Jason is taught by Anton in the thievery/combat arts, and Natalia teaches him how to be a social chameleon, the perfect charming young man (who can pick your pocket as quickly as steal your heart).

Jason is still very much a pugnacious guy, and will not hesitate to call bullshit out (or throw down). He is openly defiant of the powers that be/heroes, and critical of Batman (and especially Bruce Wayne).

I need to work on this a bit more, but I hope you enjoy what I've got so far y'all 😎👍